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Contributors’ Notes

MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue Seamus Heaney Managing Editor Susannah Lee CONTRIBUTORS William Aarnes has poems forthcoming in The South Carolina Review, and Swallow's Tale. He teaches at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. Stephen Ajay's second collection of poems, The Whales Are Burning, will be published by New…

The Gym

RINGS: ON THE LIFE OF COLLIS PHILLIPS recounts the experience of an ex-boxing champion and trainer who has lived most of his seventy-five years in the Saint Bernard housing project in New Orleans. It is based on personal experience, three years of research, letters, legal documents, hospital and prison records, newspaper reports, and scores of…

Under the Lidless Eye

These are hunters. In their season, they lurch down from the camper through gray-crusted snow to hunch ancestrally: the shiver-and-shake of urination, marking the clearing with steam. They have license. When trees rage and char, when we fold silkskins into the camphor, chewing dark fat, these men take down long bows, the fowling pistols and…

Introduction

When we invited contributions for this issue we said that our theme was “the inter-relationship or overlap of autobiography, biography, and fiction.” We asked potential contributors to “think of the three genres as forming a triangle. We are looking for prose writing — fiction, essay, memoir, journal, etc. — that falls within this area.” We’ve…

Sailing The Inland Sea

It was one of those pearl-soft days when the sky drifts in broken ridges of gray. I was on my way up the coast, planning to winter over in one of the waterfront towns on the eastern shore of Vancouver Island. It was mid-November. I had been out since early spring. I hoped to find…

The Woman Who Was Forgotten

She walks the corridor, trailing her wedding dress. There's no bun in the oven, no love letter expiring on the coffee table, nothing sticky between her fingers. All afternoon she watched them curry the horses, the whish, seeing the oiled hide shiver under her skirt. No one imagines the safety pin in her bra strap….

Unity

Gropius and I came to America in 1937 from England. We had been in London on a Leave of Absence permit from the German government and it was by no means certain that we would be allowed to return to claim our belongings, which were at the time in Berlin in care of my sister….

You Are Here

The woman across the street bends over to pull a weed from her front steps. I set a fresh cup of coffee on the Help Wanted section and watch from my second-story kitchen window. She is married to a surgeon. It's a two-Mercedes family. She and the surgeon have two daughters. One married a lawyer…

How It Might Come To Us

You might see a thin air in early April part the long grass, bleached and laid back, to breathe on your nape, the backs of your hands. It might smell like a cellar, full of coffins and canning. You would not name it, since all names become one in that time, and would you speak…